Understandably after almost 140 years, the Art Gallery of Ballarat has a lot of items in storage. Not all of its extensive collection can be displayed at once. The gallery has a lot of exhibition space, but a far larger stock of work and other artefacts, some of which has been bequeathed.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
In the past, bequests to the gallery might include one or two pieces that were possibly significant to the collection – and a whole lot of other items not suited for acquisition.
These might include pieces of furniture, crockery and ceramics, religious artefacts - or even artworks that are hazard to a collection, such as works infested with borer or other vermin.
Art Gallery of Ballarat director Gordon Morrison says that in the past, people making donations or bequests to the collection were not always discriminating.
“We have some relic collections that don’t really fit with the main core of what we do,” says Morrison.
Handing over an historic panel
One item which fits that description is a panel from the Leviathan carriage of the 1850s, renowned for plying its trade between Geelong and Ballarat.
The Cobb and Co Leviathan coaches were the luxury buses of their time (if you counted luxury as half the passengers sitting on the roof in the open weather on bone-jarring tracks).
Carrying up to 62 passengers, they could weigh an amazing six tons (over 6000kg) and were pulled by eight horses – the leading two horses being controlled by riders alongside side them.
The hand-painted panel, alleged to have been originally mounted on either the inside or outside of the coach, has been part of the gallery’s collection since 1916, when a local wheelwright and coachbuilder donated it.
Gordon Morrison said while the wood and hessian oil-painted piece had potential historical value, it was not germane to the AGB’s collection, and had been deaccessioned – removed from the official list of the gallery’s possessions.
“The panel has been on long-term loan to the museum,” he says.
“On it there’s a primitive, amateurish English landscape painting; that’s the traditional thing that would prettify the coach. The artistic merit of the painting is pretty negligible; it’s not something you would hang on the walls of the gallery. Its value is it formed part of a coach that had an historic connection to Ballarat.”
In a sign of the growing co-operation between the two Ballarat institutions, the gallery’s marketing and public programs officer Peter Freund travelled to the museum to sign a notice of transfer on Tuesday, officially presenting the piece to the collection and to the museum’s director Will Flamsteed.
Gold Museum manager of collections Elizabeth Marsden says the detective work on the panel’s provenance must now begin.
“Our head coachbuilder (Barry Hore of Sovereign Hill) knows all the history of the coaches in the district, and he’ll know a lot about this. The specialists here will be able to help identify it.”
How museum and galleries obtain (and get rid of) exhibits
The process of acquiring items for institutions such as galleries, museums and universities is called ‘accessioning’. It is a formal process, usually conducted by a committee and overseen by the board of an institution.
“It (the process) is relevant, even when we’re talking about the Eureka flag,” says Morrison.
“We talk about the Eureka flag as an accessioned item of the Art Gallery of Ballarat and that it’s been an accessioned item since the gift (of the flag) was made in 2004. What does that mean?
“An accession register is the list from beginning to end – the end is the current point in time – it’s the formal list of everything that the institution regards as it has legal title to.”
The register will have a unique number for each item and may have the year of acquisition and what its status is in terms of medium.
And when the time comes to reassess a collection?
“Most museums have a process by which they can separate works formally from the collection and they can end up with a different status,” says Morrison.
“Now that status can be everything from ‘you have to deaccession this work’ – and I’ve seen instances like this in my 40-year career – you can have a work that is so infected with insects or borer that it’s actually a danger to the rest of the collection,” he says.
In some instances, admittedly rare, says Morison, the work is then destroyed.
Works that don’t necessarily fit the collection’s orientation or overall focus may be deaccessioned, sometimes into another institution in the community; sometimes works may need to be deaccessioned because of a restitution claim, such as those looted by the Nazis in World War II.
Private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, may deaccession a work or works of lesser import to then sell and fund the purchase of a greater work.
“If they see a better Picasso, they may elect to sell off three of their lesser Picassos to improve their collection,” says Morrison.
When a gallery runs into financial strife, works may also be deaccessioned to raise funds to ensure the institution’s survival.
“The most famous example of that in Australia was in the 1930s when the National Gallery of Victoria purchased Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra from the Soviet government, from Stalin who was selling off bits of the Hermitage collection just to get hard currency,” Morrison says.
So what’s happening in Ballarat?
It’s been over 20 years since the Art Gallery of Ballarat deaccessioned a work. However in 1990 the gallery received a significant bequest, courtesy of the late Colin Hicks Caldwell.
The Art Gallery of Ballarat’s media officer Peter Freund takes up the story:
When the Colin Hicks Caldwell Bequest was announced in 1990, it was described as “the most generous bequest in its 105-year history”, a claim that has some potential challengers, but it is certainly a gift that has had a huge impact on the gallery collection over the past nearly 30 years.
When Caldwell died suddenly in October 1989, aged 76, his plans for the disposal of his estate were revealed. Various friends were invited to select paintings or ceramics from his collection, and the Ballarat Gallery was to have as much as it wanted of the remaining “pictures and any remaining antique items of porcelain, earthenware, silverware, glassware, wooden or bronze objects and furniture.”
The gift was in two parts – there was Caldwell’s own collection of paintings, furniture, porcelain and other objects, and then there was the ongoing annual injection of funds for acquisitions from half the income from his estate, valued at that time at over $2 million.
Caldwell’s collection was put on display in 1990 after it was received by the Ballarat Gallery. It was a large and individual collection of a man who felt that “the general fabric of society had declined after the reign of George IV”, so Georgian furniture and silverware and a large collection of porcelain featured. George Paton had actually introduced Caldwell to Joseph Burke as “knowing more about 18th century English porcelain than it was decent for a man to know”.
In the absence of a decorative arts gallery, and as English work lacking context, it is not often seen on display. Indeed, there has recently been a decision, to which the trustees of the estate have agreed, that some of the larger items of furniture will be sold, and the funds raised used to buy an item of items of Australian Modernist furniture, which will sit more comfortably with the rest of the Gallery collection.
That time has come. Gordon Morrison says the furniture in the bequest has no provenance in the Ballarat region, and is not of any great historic, aesthetic or artistic value, so it will be sold.
He says the gallery is lacking in quality examples of modernist pieces designed and manufactured in Australia, such as those of the Featherstons.
“The dominating factor will be to try and maximise the return. We will be looking at what is the way that we could sell that furniture off and make the most amount of money so that we could buy the best Grant and Mary Featherston furniture in the future.
“It won’t be done in my time here, but it should be done in the best way to maximise the return to the gallery,” says Morrison.